How to Increase Client Retention and Billable Hours with Mio
What’s the main objective of a successful marketing agency? To help customers create compelling marketing campaigns? To ensure client retention?
Or is it to bill as many clients as possible in the most productive manner?
Often there is a productivity blocker to this idyllic cycle you dreamed up when joining a marketing agency…
Client management.
Retainer clients are the lifeblood of a marketing agency. But, they come with lots of hand-holding and major reporting.
If you could gain all that time back, think of the extra clients you could onboard.
Well the good news is that we have a solution to help you with that.
Let’s walk through how you can improve client retention and increase your billable hours.
Collaborate with clients on campaigns and deliverables
What does a typical day look like?
Sift through emails in the morning, get up to speed with your Slack messages, then start your working on some client work with your team?
Then before you know it, you have to jump on a call with a client to deliver the monthly report.
You leave Slack, log into Microsoft Teams, and rustle around to find the minutes from your last meeting.
The meeting probably could have been an email 🙄 and you feel like an hour has been wasted.
Keeping a client focused on delivering the task you’re working on is tough when they’ve assumed you have everything you need. So, when you need to get something from them in real-time, it’s often left until the next email and productivity is halted.
Wouldn’t it be easier if you could collaborate with clients on campaigns and deliverables in real-time instead of allotting times to go over everything in one go?
You know it’s not productive but you use Slack and your client uses Teams.
So real-time messaging is out the window. You can’t get your graphic approved and the edits for your copy will take days to get to the right person and move through the chain of command.
And all because you use different apps.
If you’re sick of leaving your favorite chat app when it comes to collaborating with clients, you’re not alone.
Maybe you have to shut down Microsoft Teams and switch to Slack.
Wouldn’t it be easier to stay in your favorite chat app and collaborate with clients on campaigns and deliverables?
Well…you can.
How do you achieve this? It’s simple.
Collaborate on marketing campaigns and project deliverables with your clients in your preferred chat app.
For example, if you use Microsoft Teams for internal use, you can now chat to your clients that use Slack – without leaving Microsoft Teams.
So, instead of leaving your app in favor of your clients, you create a universal channel between the two.
Microsoft Teams users chat with Slack users.
Slack users chat with Microsoft Teams.
Once installed, you have access to your client in real-time or asynchronously without the fuss of switching apps, transferring files from one to the other, and losing billable time getting up to speed all over again.
All you need to do is install our app and choose your platform of choice.
Once you install and your clients join, you start providing better and more frequent communication with your clients.
You work with your clients in real-time, getting the most out of the app you chose for that very reason.
The less time you spend managing updates for retainer clients, the more time you have to onboard new clients.
Ultimately, increased productivity = better client retention = more billable customers.
Manage your clients from a single chat app
How many clients you do manage at a time?
If your answer is more than one and they don’t use the same collaboration app as me, then universal channels can help you too.
Working in an agency doesn’t mean you must abide by the rules of historical agencies that have existed before you. Email no longer has to be the most used communications tool. Not every client report needs to be written late at night because you’ve been pitching all day.
Instead of leaving Slack to write a thousand-word email update, you can increase response time by supporting multiple clients in separate universal channels.
Set up a universal channel per client and invite your contacts. It doesn’t matter what app they use – Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Webex Teams are all supported in a universal channel.
Everybody stays in the platform of their choice and your client interactions are complete in record time – freeing up your time to take on another client.
To recap, you stay in Slack. Your clients stay in their platform – like Microsoft Teams or Webex Teams. Simply, you collaborate with clients as you would with colleagues.
And the same is true vice versa. If you use Microsoft Teams or Webex, stay in your preferred app and invite the Slack users you need to collaborate with.
You can literally manage all clients from a single chat app.
You may also like: Slack vs Email: Talking To Your Customers
Increase customer satisfaction in retainer clients with Mio
By creating a universal channel between you and your client, you have opened up a direct link for real-time messaging.
Retainer clients that ask for iterative changes and regular reports usually have to wait for their weekly/monthly update or have to explore the reporting suite they’ve employed you to manage.
Instead of storing all queries for the scheduled call, retainer clients can ask for ad-hoc requests and you can respond in real-time.
The result? Increased customer satisfaction and client retention.
And the best part? There’s no additional maintenance.
“The installation process was instant and pretty seamless, which I really appreciated. Just a few clicks and we were ready to roll.”
Brendan Hufford, Director of SEO at Directive
Universal channels are quick and easy to set up. You simply install the Mio app and collaborate with teams and contractors in minutes.
How universal channels help marketing agencies
Whether you are a creative agency, SEO agency, or brand agency, universal channels enable you to provide clients with better and more frequent communication.
Stay in sync with all your clients throughout every stage of the campaign. Provide better and more frequent communication between deliverables. Onboard new clients with the time you save thanks to your new productive way of working.
No more email. No more app switching.
In conclusion, universal channels allow you to:
- Work with your retainer clients not against them
- Provide rapid responses to urgent client queries
- Increase client retention
- Spend more time onboarding new clients instead of managing email updates
To improve customer satisfaction with your retainer clients, learn more about Mio here.